Today’s Rocky Mountain News has an article titled Is dot.corn honeymoon over?  As someone in the middle of the dot.com thing (and I hated hated hated the label dot.com – or dotcom as it evolved), I found this completely hysterical (and appropriate.) 

Frank Shorter has an excellent essay in the NY Times titled Running Into Trouble.  If you are a long distance runner, you are probably aware that last week’s Chicago Marathon was halted after three hours after dozens of people were hospitalized and one runner actually died. 

I ran Chicago in 2003 and it was my PR by at least 20 minutes (4:05) and an awesome experience.  It’s a great race for first time marathoners which makes the experience last Sunday even more devastating as anyone that has trained for a marathon for the first time knows how emotionally important it is to finish.

Everything I’ve read the 2007 Chicago Marathon so far has been reactive – speculating on what happened and laying out facts and figures.  Shorter’s essay is the first prescriptive article I’ve read – if you are a marathoner or race organizer Running Into Trouble is worth five minutes of your life.

I’m about to head out to play an early game of tennis with my brother Daniel.  He sent me the following picture from our recent trip to the US Open for inspiration.

It’s pitch black outside but I’m sure the sun will be up around 7am when we hit the court.  Note the snazzy belt I’m wearing – that was my September life dinner gift from Amy (she upped the ante in October – a lot.)

Charlie Wood reminded me in his comment to my post The Purpose of Numbers on a Y Axis that Greg Reinacker’s first pitch to me had a revenue graph lacking Y Axis values.  For those of you that don’t know Greg, he’s the founder / CTO of NewsGator, a company that I was the seed investor in and am very proud of.  Here’s that graph from the first presentation.

Fortunately (for both me and Greg), he had plenty of other slides in that first presentation, including the money shot that was the vision slide.

This was spring 2004.  I didn’t know what RSS was, nor did the vast majority of people who know about it today.  Greg was way ahead of the curve, explained it to me in a way that helped me overlook his lame revenue chart, and resulted in our investment in NewsGator in the summer of 2004.

While this demonstrates that I can get past my pet peeves, please put numbers on your Y Axis.

Every day I get a fresh pile of emails containing executive summaries and powerpoint presentations (keep them coming by the way) inquiring whether I’d be interested in exploring an investment.  I try to quickly look at them all and decide immediately whether or not I want to spend any time considering investing in the business.

There is an endless list of nitpicky things I could suggest that would improve these executive summaries and powerpoint presentations.  I’ll spare you those.  There is also an endless list of substantive things I could suggest.  For example, what is wrong with the following graph?

Um.  Not useful.  I got that you’ve had relative growth but you are missing the numbers on the y-axis.  If you think I’m a total buckethead, you’d assume I’d be impressed by this growth.  However, my first question is “so, what is the 2007 revenue?”  I looked at the next few pages in the presentation and it was nowhere to be found.

If you trust me (or are interested in me) enough to send me a ppt unsolicited, please at least give me the real quantitative data for me to react to – assuming you think it’s an important part of your presentation.  If it’s not an important part of your presentation (e.g. tiny numbers so far – nice yoy % growth, but tiny numbers) don’t include it!

At least I got a blog post out of this one.

I just invested 90 minutes in watching The last public lecture of Randy Pausch.  Randy is a CMU professor who has done pioneering work in Human Computer Interaction, was a co-creator of Alice, co-founded CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center and – after watching his last lecture – is one of those amazingly inspiring and centered humans who understands what is important in life.

Other than knowing about Alice and occasionally stumbling across Randy’s work and research as I study HCI, I haven’t given Randy much thought.  A friend send me a link to the lecture and said that it was a “must watch” lecture.  As I started to watch it, I learned the backstory (from Randy – who is 47) that he had terminal pancreatic cancer and had about three to six months left of good health.  That context made the lecture even more remarkable.

Ostensibly the lecture was about “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.”  However, Randy often referred to the notion of “head fakes” throughout the lecture.  At the end, he revealed the first of his two head fakes – which is that the lecture is really about “How To Lead Your Life.”  To hear the other head fake, you need to watch the lecture.

About 20 of the 90 minutes was consumed by the intro and conclusion from other folks, but even this was worth it – both in the set up of the lecture and the recognition of the amazing work that Randy has done and the impact he has had on so many people.

Fantastic stuff.

As an MIT grad I periodically acknowledge that there was a thing referred to as a university down the river from me.  They have this statue of a dude named John Harvard in one of the yards.

John got a makeover today ala Halo 3.  Nice helmet John.

While Amy and I were sitting in the San Francisco Airport reading the Sunday NY Times, we came across an article titled Looking for Inspiration in the Melting Ice.  It discusses a great new exhibit at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art titled Weather Report: Art & Climate Change.  BMoCA is one of our local gems – if you happen to be in Boulder, swing by the museum on 13th Street and check out the exhibit.  Have lunch at The Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse while you are at it.

One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons is “On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog.”  Nick Bradbury – the creator of FeedDemon (one of the NewsGator products) is having an online argument with Calvin on his blog.  Nick lobs in the first bomb with My Dog is an Asshole.  Calvin responds with My Master is an Asshole (a Response From Calvin).  Priceless.